Anne O’Byrne - Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch

When striving to re- form the pattern of our own way of life, we often invoke Nature as our great teacher, seeking to justify man’s

actions by arguments based on what happens in nature.

—ADOLFPORTMANN, Forms and Patterns of Animals

Grammatology must pursue and consolidate whatever, in scientiﬁ c practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure.

—JACQUESDERRIDA, Positions

The natural sciences . . . have done the “unthinkable,” and now use thinking to try to grasp what they have done.

—HANNAHARENDT, D XXIV.58.643

She has also long been attuned to the work of scientists, whether on the Sputnik project or on splitting the atom or in basic research. What is new here is the fact that Portmann is a biologist, and that, for him, appearance is interesting speciﬁ cally as the appearance of the natural world around us.

His studies extend from butterﬂ ies to Mediterranean sea snails, and his examples include tulip poplars, wild carrots, tawny owls, and embryos of many species of mammal. His theory and practice of morphology became an unorthodox strand within evolutionary theory. In addition, he developed the thought of human neoteny in a work devoted to the various morpholo-gies of the ﬁ rst year of human life.

As a result, the Denktagebuch entries on Portmann turn out to be entrances onto the realm of life or, more to the point, onto a distinctive and dynamic thinking of life. What can this mean for Arendt, for whom life was another long- term, troublesome interest? What drew her to Portmann’s work?

Sometimes life is for her a matter of zoe, the merely living existence that threatens to take over the sphere of human action and freedom, and some-times it is bios, the worldly life of human beings. Somesome-times it is both; natal-ity, for example, is for Arendt a matter of our natural mammalian emergence from our mothers’ bodies but also the signal of our capacity for the highest, most distinctively human actions. But the bios/zoe distinction is hardly rele-vant to Portmann, who regards his work as biology and zoology and eventu-ally also as anthropology. Given this, what status can Arendt grant the insights he offers? Are they the incontrovertible, compelling truths of scien-tiﬁ c knowledge (D XXIV.14.622) or the more speculative—and therefore more politically and philosophically interesting— claims of a human sci-ence? Are they the cognitive products of empirical study or the worldly manifestation of thought? Are they a matter, in Kantian terms, of Verstand or of Vernunft? Are they contributions to our knowledge of the functioning of bodies or to our appreciation of the intensities of life?

Philosophers who approach the sciences—and indeed other disciplines within the humanities—sometimes proceed as if they know more than they do, or as if their capacity for metalevel analysis equips them to under-stand what they ﬁ nd going on among the scientists. They may even behave as if their theoretical point of view makes it unnecessary to understand the detail and technicality of what they see, which might be part of the reason why Arendt, despite her philosophical training, refused to describe herself as a philosopher. She took seriously the need to avoid philosophical hubris by educating herself as any member of the reading public would; in the case of biology, this meant reading Portmann’s books, among others. Yet, while she may have turned to him as a popular scientist, to be appreciated for his

ability to translate his research into layman’s terms, she engages his work as a fellow thinker of the human condition, a fellow member of the reading and writing public. Passing through her Denktagebuch notes and The Life of the Mind to his thinking of life leads us to their meeting place in the question of meaning.³ There we ﬁ nd both the thinker of political life and the observer of sea sponges, the student of the totalitarian system and the critic of technological thinking, the professor who urges us to love the world enough to take responsibility for it and the one who leads us back to a childish love for a zebra’s stripes, both of them reaching for a love of the shared world that must be both knowledgeable and thoughtful.

The Circle of Thought and the Metaphor of Life

The Life of the Mind, originally envisioned as a sequel to The Human Condi-tion, begins with a volume on thinking, which in turn begins with a section on appearance. The book was ﬁ rst published in 1978, having been pre-sented as part of the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1973, but the connection between thinking and appearing emerged earlier in Arendt’s thought and was concisely formulated in a Denktagebuch entry made in November 1968:

Re: volume II of Human Condition: All that lives strives to appear (see Portmann). All functions show themselves—but not the silent dialogue of thinking, not the will and also not judgment. They are, without necessarily coming into appearance.

“Being shows itself as thought” (Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 48). And how does thinking show itself? (D XXVI.1.701)

The note captures the phenomenological sensibility that is evident throughout her work, not only with the quotation from Heidegger but also with the reference to Portmann’s morphology. Portmann is mentioned in the Denktagebuch between 1966 and 1968, in the period when the thinking that would come to light in the 1973 lectures was under way—whatever that might mean. This is Arendt’s question.

After all, we each appear into a world and it is not a matter of mere appearing or a mode of existence that is somehow second best. We are the sort of beings who see and are seen and for whom appearing is active, a vital element of existence. For us, being is appearing. As living beings we are not accidentally located in the world but belong to the world even as it belongs to us. It was old when we arrived in it, and it will persist even when we have gone, so our experience of time and ﬁ nitude is shaped by the arc

of life between birth and death, that is, our appearance on the earth and eventual disappearance from it. Our ﬁ rst appearing presupposed a specta-tor, so our being in the world is never in the singular; we exist here in the plural. Also, seeing and sentience are not abstractions; the world appears to us in the ways made possible by the speciﬁ c bodies and senses we have.

Arendt writes: “Seen from the perspective of the world, every creature born into it arrives well equipped to deal with a world in which Being and Appearing coincide.”⁴ Without mentioning its source, she sets about cor-recting Heidegger’s assertion that animals are poor in world by celebrating a diversity of rich human and nonhuman worlds. She writes:

Nothing perhaps is more surprising in this world of ours than the almost inﬁ nite diversity of its appearances, the sheer entertainment value of its views, sounds and smells, something that is hardly men-tioned by the thinkers and philosophers. . . . This diversity is matched by an equally astounding diverseness of sense organs among the ani-mal species, so that what actually appears to living creatures assumes the greatest variety of form and shape: every animal species lives in a world of its own, [though] all sense- endowed creatures have appear-ance as such in common, ﬁ rst, an appearing world and second . . . the fact that they themselves are appearing and disappearing creatures.⁵ There is an important train in Arendt’s thought that stretches from The Human Condition, with its thinking of world and worldly action as appear-ance, to the late Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, where attention is turned to the actor/spectators who together sense and make sense of the appearing world.⁶ The abiding image of the ﬁ rst is of Pericles—statesman and general—addressing his fellow Athenians, while the image that endures from the second is that of the uninvolved spectators on the events of the French Revolution, whose watchful participation “make the event at home in the history of the world.”⁷ In those late lectures, the spectators’ participa-tion relies on a distinctive human capacity, the sensus communis or Menschen-verstand, the common understanding of man.⁸ As this thought train passes through The Life of the Mind and the question of how thinking appears, we will see Socrates emerge as the revelatory ﬁ gure. Yet here, at the point early in The Life of the Mind where her thinking encounters Portmann’s, what is important is that appearances are sensed, and that sensing is the province of all sentient beings. Arendt now has the occasion to consider the material speciﬁ city of every point of view; the world—any world—is the product of distinct, species- speciﬁ c body forms. Beetles’ eyes give them a rich world quite different from ours. We do not share their world—we don’t have the

eyes for it—but we appear in it and they appear in ours. Indeed, they appear to us in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors that conﬁ rms Arendt’s insight that the ﬂ ood of appearances, in all its diversity and abundance, is endlessly entertaining to us. If there is a ﬁ gure to accompany this stage in her thought, it is that of the natural scientist observing the living world.

Elsewhere, when Arendt is concerned with the work of scientists, her examples are physicists, and the scientiﬁ c projects that appear on the pages of her works are typically the great physics projects of the mid–twentieth century that culminated in splitting the atom and the technological develop-ment of the atomic bomb. The worldly modevelop-ment that opens The Human Condition is the launch of Sputnik, while the image of scientiﬁ c work that concludes the book is of scientists working together to initiate a new process in nature. Biology could readily provide the model, but for Arendt the release of atomic energy into nature remains paradigmatic. This is not surprising.

World War II and the Cold War meant that the work of Meitner, Hahn, Straussman, and Frisch would quickly surge to political signiﬁ cance and public consciousness; they discovered nuclear ﬁ ssion in 1938, and in 1945 Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize. In that same year the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan. Crick, Watson, Wilkins, and Franklin dis-covered the structure of DNA in 1953, and the discovery earned the Nobel Prize in 1962. The emergence of biotechnology happened rather more slowly, and the signiﬁ cance of the changes underway in the science of life—

so present to us now— drew public attention more gradually.

Yet, since Arendt is a thinker concerned with the life conditions of natal-ity and mortalnatal-ity, we could reasonably expect her to be attuned to changes in the understanding of life. After all, Sputnik was signiﬁ cant for our human condition not because of the engineering and rocket science that brought it into being but because its launch promised to change the human condition of living on Earth and sharing the planet with all other humans. In fact, Arendt was clearly interested in biology. Her library holds several volumes, with marginalia in her hand, of contemporary works in popular biology including What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger, Man and the Living World by Karl Von Frisch (not to be confused with the ﬁ ssion physicist Otto Robert Frisch), and The Language of Life: An Introduction to the Science of Genetics by George and Muriel Beadle.⁹ In addition, she followed Hans Jonas’s pre-scient work on bioengineering, and, as we have seen, she owned and read several volumes of Portmann’s work.

What these have in common is a commitment to the scientiﬁ c mode of encountering the world, paired with an appreciation of its limits. Arendt notes a passage where Schrödinger, writing about the physics of life, states:

It is the four dimensional pattern of the “phenotype,” the visible and manifest nature of the individual, which is reproduced without appre-ciable change for generations, permanent within centuries—though not within tens of thousands of years—and borne at each transmission by the material structure of the nuclei of the two cells which unite to form the fertilized egg cell. That is a marvel—than which only one is greater, one that is intimately connected with it, yet lies on a different plane. I mean the fact that we, whose total being is entirely based on a marvellous interplay of this very kind, yet possess the power of acquir-ing considerable knowledge about it. I think it possible that this knowl-edge may advance to little short of a complete understanding—of the ﬁ rst marvel. The second may be beyond human understanding.¹⁰

The distinction Schrödinger couches in mystical terms is the distinc-tion between knowledge, which holds out the promise of completeness, and the being of the knower, which inevitably exceeds knowledge and confounds all efforts at completion.

When Beadle and Beadle describe the process of genetic mutation and its workings in evolution, they, too, run up against a limit. Arendt marks this passage: “One gasps a bit on contemplating the exquisite timing that was necessary—not to bring us into being but just to make us possible.

Nature must have made mistakes by the millions.”¹¹ The gasp comes when we realize the scale of the universe and the fact that our existence depends on contingency upon contingency, but embedded in this experience is the additional realization that nature, which science must approach as though it were a rule- governed system, must have deviated from those rules many times in order for our existence to be even possible. Not only are we inca-pable of accounting for our having come into being, but it is also beyond knowledge. Our existence as the beings we are could not have been pre-dicted. What’s more, genetic mutation is only part of the picture. In Port-mann’s Neue Wege in Biologie, Arendt marks this passage with an exclamation mark: “One of the most reliable arrangements there is for the regular occurrence of new combinations is that curious game that biologists call sexuality.”¹²

What we gain from scientiﬁ c encounters with the world is truth, but the gap between knowing and being—indicated by Schrödinger, hinted at by Arendt in the closing pages of The Human Condition, and indeed worked through by Kant in the Transcendental Aesthetic—persists, and generates the distinction between truth and meaning. Along with a desire to know, we have a need for meaning, which is pursued through the activity of think-ing.¹³ Cognition not only cannot give us meaning, but it also disguises that

fact by covering over the gap even as it uncovers truth. The science of life, and indeed our everyday way of knowing, approach the living organism as capable of full appearance in the course of its short life; it suggests that nothing bars our way to complete knowledge of it and, if knowledge is true and complete, why should there by a need for meaning?¹⁴ In contrast, Arendt argues that the living body does not give itself unreservedly to the observing eye; the constant changes that are part of metabolism, growth, and aging mean that any state of a living body is a passing state, and the condition of being alive does not allow living bodies to be revealed in the ways that dead matter can be. The incompleteness of our knowledge of living beings is constitutive rather than incidental or merely temporary.

Thus science runs up against its limits, opening the space where the ques-tion of meaning arises.

Philosophy is apt to occupy this space, but Arendt resists philosophy’s metaphysical tendency— established by Plato—to construe it as the gap between two worlds. Invariably, the otherworldly cause of appearance is granted more reality than the appearance itself—think not only of Plato’s forms but also Descartes’s causal argument from the Second Meditation—

so that appearances must be penetrated in order to get to their ground and therefore their meaning. More surprisingly, she regards modern science as giving new life to this old tendency.¹⁵ Science keeps its eyes turned toward this one world, but it persists in delving behind appearance in search of truth, privileging the base of appearance above the appearance itself. This is what happens when the colors of a bird are understood only in reference to the evolutionary function that they serve, that is, when the wealth of appearance is reduced to the life process.

This move beyond appearance is not our only alternative. Indeed, for Arendt, it is no alternative at all, since we must live in the world of appear-ances. The choice between appearance and reality is a false dilemma that, in its modern version, has its roots in the failure to grasp the distinction between Kant’s Verstand or Intellect, which allows us to know, and Vernunft or Reason, which drives us to pursue meaning. The former gives access to the world that appears to our senses; the latter has been understood as leading us to ask for the meaning behind appearances. But what Kant does when he discerns a world where the things in themselves are as we are in our world of appearances is identify a semblance of reason or an authentic semblance. Earlier, Arendt cited Portmann’s distinction between authentic appearances, that is, appearances that present themselves, and inauthentic appearances, which are forced into view as an animal’s inner organs are brought to light by dissection. Now, applying the language of authenticity

and inauthenticity to semblance and tracing Kant’s discovery to the expe-rience of thinking, she hones her thesis to a ﬁ ne point:

Hence, in our context the only relevant question is whether the sem-blances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disap-pear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the para-doxical condition of a living being that though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.¹⁶

Does such worldly thinking appear? As we saw in the Denktagebuch note, the form that Arendt’s question for The Human Condition II took in 1968 was “How does thinking show itself ?” In the course of these early

Im Dokument Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (Seite 99-117)